Photographs,occasional jottings on poetry & visual culture, local oddities and the weather.

Saturday, 16 November 2013

John James

It
was a great pleasure to hear John James (above left, moderated by Simon Smith,
right) talk about his work at the University of Kent on Thursday afternoon and
then to read at the Veg Box aka Free Range Café in the evening after dinner at Café
Mauresque. Sometime in the seventies or early eighties I picked up a copy of
James’ Striking the Pavilion of Zero
(1975) at Collected Works bookshop in Melbourne. His Salt Collected Poems came out in 2002 and there have been subsequent
books like In Romsey Town (Equipage,
2011) and Cloud Breaking Sun
(Oystercatcher, 2012). The poems take on board the energies of popular culture
referencing various sources from The Who to Tricky: they’re alive and
negotiating with what’s around them sharply, precisely, without condescension.